We study the cost of breaching an implicit contract in a goods market, building on a recent study that documented the presence of such a contract in the Coca-Cola market, in the US, during 1886-1959. The implicit contract promised a serving of Coca-Cola of a constant quality (the "real thing"),...

We examine a balanced panel of globalization indices for 129 countries over the years 1991- 2010. We report evidence of cross-country sigma convergence in the overall globalization index. Sigma convergence also holds for each of the economic, political, and social globalization indices, as well...

Will a society's political agents provide good governance? An answer must be sought first and foremost at the constitutional level. While Austrians have made important contributions to constitutional political economy (CPE), they have often avoided interesting and important questions regarding...

Classical liberals favor an institutional environment of economic freedom. A society's institutional environment emerges as a set of political outcomes that take shape within a higher- order framework or constitution. While many scholars have explored the relationship between institutional...

Governments of rich nations tend to have high fiscal capacity while being credibly limited in their use of revenues (Johnson and Koyama 2017). This poses a puzzle. A government powerful enough to effectively enforce property rights under the rule of law is also powerful enough to prey upon the...

We use the sensitivity of bank holding company equity returns to market interest rates as an indicator of perceived maturity mismatch. Based on data from 1990 to 2009, there is only weak evidence that market participants perceived banks to be effectively short-funded. However, looking at 1990 to...

We use annual data on capital's share and relative factor prices from 35 US industries from 1960 to 2005 to test the induced innovation hypothesis. We derive, from a production function framework, testable implications for the effect of contemporaneous and lagged factor price ratios on capital's...